World War II plane gets noticed

Elkhart County owner has long history in aviation.

BENTON -- It's been noticed by almost everyone who drives down U.S. 33. On the east side of the road there is a house with an airplane sitting in the yard.

The homeowner who gave a portion of his lawn to this 1940 Beechcraft C45 airplane is Lowell Farrand, 79, a lifelong Goshen-area resident who spent 65 years flying airplanes and working in the aircraft industry.

"I started flying when I was 14," Farrand said. "I've always been interested in airplanes."

Farrand says he acquired the plane about 15 years ago and it's been parked on his lawn ever since.

The plane was acquired for free by the now-defunct Northern Indiana Air Museum, which at the time had a working C45 that members flew.

The 1940 Beechcraft was set for the scrap yard when Farrand and other museum members decided the aircraft had too much history to be destroyed. The original intention was to restore the plane, but after it arrived in Goshen from Detroit, where it had been saved from the scrap yard by another man, it was realized there was too much work to be done.

"Economically, it's just beyond fixing," Farrand said.

According to Farrand, the two 450 horsepower engines are too far deteriorated to be restored. Farrand said the cost of a working C45 is about $145,000.

The C45 that sits on Farrand's lawn was sent to the United Kingdom in 1940 as part of the Lend-Lease program, which kept the U.S. out of World War II at the time, but gave supplies to Allied countries. The plane, along with instructors, was given to England to train navigators for the British military.

The plane was outfitted with state-of-the-art technology that would search for radio beacons. When three beacons were detected, a navigator could figure out where they were and how to get back to his base, Farrand said.

After the war, the plane sat for years.

"Vandals tore off everything they could until it started to look bad," he said.

Farrand said hundreds of people stop to inquire about the plane every year.

"It's amazing," he said. "People going down the road, almost every day somebody stops."

In addition to just people driving by, Farrand said he's had high school students have their senior pictures taken with the plane, as well as last fall when a Ford Model A club passing through stopped for pictures with the plane as well.

"They had 50 Model A's lined up around the plane," Farrand said.

Last year, Farrand said two World War II veterans who worked with this type of plane as instructors stopped for a look.

"They hugged the propellers and cried," he said.

"It's made it all worthwhile, just the people coming and seeing it," he said. "I enjoy the people who come and stop and see it."

The plane is an important artifact to Farrand, not just a conversation piece, and he said that its historical value and the technology that was so advanced for its time when the plane was new, make it worth saving.

"I just wanted children today to see what round engines (like the ones featured on this plane) were like and what things were like back then," he said. "I couldn't see it cut up."

Farrand never served in the military but worked for various companies as a test pilot and worked on military airplanes under civilian contracts.